The Greatest Storm: Britain's Night of Destruction, November 1703

By Martin Brayne

All but forgotten now, the Great Storm of 26/27 November 1703 was the worst storm experienced in recorded history in the British Isles. Over 8000 people died and the losses of property and shipping were immense. Martin Brayne tells in vivid detail the story of this tragic and catastrophic event. While almost everyone knows something about those two classic disaster scenarios of the Stuart age, the Great Fire of 1666 and the Great Plague of the year before, hardly anyone knows the story of the Great Storm of 1703, the worst that has occurred in the British Isles. Winds and rain lashed the entire country and floods were reported almost everywhere. Famously, Henry Winstanley had the misfortune to be in the wooden lighthouse which he had designed on Eddystone Rocks of Plymouth on 26 November 1703. The lighthouse was destroyed and Winstanley died.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Nov 8, 2002
• ISBN: 9780750954129

Book preview

Storm

ONE

Dies Irae

At some point in the pitch black of the November night, the painted glass bulged, exploded and crashed to the nave floor, skimming and splintering. Through the gaping hole in the Great West Window shrieked a destructive stream of air. The creaking of ancient timbers and the thunderous falling of stonework filled the church with a massive, pandemonic fugue. As the storm raged on, more glass was torn from the mullions and tracery so that by daylight, with a gale-force wind still howling, one of the finest works of English medieval art lay in ruins. But all had gone unheard in the greater roar; an unearthly and terrifying sound that covered the south of England from Land’s End to the North Foreland. The new day was 27 November 1703. The worst storm experienced in historical times in England was playing itself out at Fairford in Gloucestershire.

Once the wind had begun to die down, chimneys ceased to crash through roofs, tiles stopped flying through the air, thatch and haystacks no longer filled the sky with wind-borne straw, and the vicar ventured out to examine the damaged fabric of his church. His home, a large house on the south side of what is now London Road (then Vicarage Street), was a couple of hundred yards from the church. As he picked his way across the debris-strewn Market Place, passing the inns which provided the small Cotswold town with much of its prosperity, parishioners, like Job’s comforters, may well have led him to expect the worst. In common with the 600–700 members of his flock, Edward Shipman, must have been both relieved to be alive and amazed by the degree of devastation. His church of St Mary the Virgin, having resisted the ugly iconoclasm of the civil wars half a century before, its marvellous painted-glass windows lime-washed over, still stood. But its glory was in ruins, a blasted wreck of late medieval magnificence.

Unlike most English parish churches, the exterior of St Mary’s is all of a piece, having been rebuilt in the Late Perpendicular style in the last decade of the fifteenth century: ‘John Tame began the fair new Church at Fairforde and Edward Tame finishid it’. So symmetrical was the building that Shipman, who had been vicar for seventeen years and had known the church all his life, would immediately have noticed that part of the battlemented wall above the porch was missing and that on the roof the wind had rolled up the sheets of lead like scrolls of paper. Only when he got to the west end of the church, however, would the real loss become apparent: the sickening sight of the Great Window, 25 ft high, and 15 ft across, smashed through so that little remained above the transom, and the windows on either side, especially that to the south, were likewise blown in, wrecked.

This must have been a grim spectacle all too clearly brought into focus when he entered the church. As the smithereens of glass crunched beneath his feet, the familiar scene, which had inspired him, his father before him and the parishioners of Fairford for so long, was revealed in ruins. Shipman perfectly understood, none better, the true nature of the loss. A few weeks later, by which time he would have known that this was no freak storm which had singled out his little corner of Christendom alone, he wrote a letter describing the damage:

It is the fineness of our church which magnifies our present loss, for in the whole it is a large and noble structure, within and without of ashlar, curiously wrought and consisting of a stately roof in the middle and two aisles running a considerable length from one end of it to the other, makes a very beautiful figure. . . . It is also adorned with 28 admired and celebrated windows. . . . Now that part of it which most of all felt the fury of the winds was a large middle west window . . . it represents the general Judgement. . . . The upper part of this window, just above the place where our Saviour’s picture is drawn sitting on a rainbow and the earth his footstool is entirely ruined. . . .

In reconstructing in his mind’s eye the windows through which the light of day was once so gloriously filtered, Shipman would have had no prompts such as assist today in the repair of damaged works of art, no architects’ drawings or photographs. Nor would he have needed them. The Great Window with its circles of angels and martyrs, red, blue and polychrome, concentric about the figure of Our Lord, was the incontrovertible fact of his spiritual life, the reification of his faith, his link in a world of frail and transitory lives, with the eternal. At the height of the Storm his thoughts may well have turned to a particular detail of this portrayal of the Doom: at the focal point of the great central window, the earth, Christ’s footstool, was depicted with towers and palaces crumbling. In the clamour and violence of that night the God-fearing majority of the age must have believed that they were witnessing just such a scene; that this was the wrath of God levelling man’s feeble works with the dust.

Many must have been the inhabitants of Fairford who, as they cowered in their houses, believed the Last Day to be upon them and every louder blast of wind the Final Trumpet. As their houses were rocked and buffeted and the noise increased to levels previously unheard and tiles and slates flew across the streets and lanes, many would have fallen to prayer and imaginations would have conjured up thoughts of the church windows so instrumental in teaching them the fundamental stories of their faith. The minds of many would surely have concentrated on that part of the Great Window below the central transom that featured in brilliant colour and startling detail the consequences for the dead, rising from their graves, of eternal judgement. The central figure was of St Michael, clad in gold armour and weighing the souls of the judged in the balance. To his right, the dominant colours were white, yellow and gold portraying the entrance of the blessed into Paradise. To his left, reds and purples showed the descent of the damned into Hell and the torments that await them. Did any old widow woman, thought to have nagged her husband to an early grave and suspected by the local gossips of witchcraft, tottering on the edge of dementia, believe that, like the crone in the window, a devil was pushing her in a wheelbarrow into the Inferno? Certainly many, in that more literal age, must have expected the opening up of the earth and the dread spectacle of the flaming pit.

Even sophisticated minds must have been troubled. The young vicar of St Keverne on the frequently windswept Lizard peninsula in Cornwall and one of the first parishes to receive the full impact of the Storm as it drove in from the west, described the event with a mixture of scientific accuracy and religious credulity typical of the educated classes of the day; standing, as it were, trembling, at the door of the Enlightenment. According to his account, the Storm arrived from the north-west between eight and nine o’clock in the evening. By ten it had veered from west to south-west and back to west again and between eleven and midnight blew in such a manner that ‘the Country hereabout thought the great day of Judgement was coming’. That this was the anger of the God of the Old Testament few across England could have doubted. Richard Chapman, the vicar of Cheshunt could hardly have been surprised. The previous May he had published a tract entitled, The Necessity of Repentence asserted: to avert those judgements which the present war and unseasonableness of the weather at present seem to threaten this nation with.

By the following morning, back at Fairford, although a great deal of physical damage had been wrought, Shipman’s parishioners appear to have escaped remarkably lightly. Far from enduring the miseries and confusion of Hell, nobody had been killed or even significantly injured. The poor, living in cottages shorn of their thatch, probably suffered the most, as always tends to be the case when natural calamity strikes. Although chimneys had collapsed and tiles had been stripped from the roofs of houses, Shipman believed that to dwell upon the fate of the poor cottagers ‘would be frivolous as well as vexatious’.

The Storm, however, had not quite finished with Fairford, for at two o’clock on the Saturday afternoon, ‘without any previous warning a sudden flash of lightning, with a short but violent clap of thunder, immediately following it, like the discharge of ordnance, fell upon a new and strong-built house in the middle of the town, and at the same time disjointed two chimneys, melted some of the lead of an upper window and struck the mistress of the house into a swoon . . .’.

In Fairford, as across southern England, it was the upstanding features of the landscape, churches, chimneys, windmills and trees, which had proved, together with the ill-built hovels of the poor, most vulnerable to the onslaught. In most small market towns and villages the church was the only building of significance. Thirty years earlier, Count Lorenzo Magalotti was travelling about England with the Grand Duke of Tuscany. His description of Axminster in Devon, could have served for any number of similar settlements: ‘a collection of two hundred houses, many of which are made with mud and thatched with straw. It contains nothing considerable except the parish church . . .’. Because of their significance in the lives of the population, their architectural pre-eminence within most communities and the literacy of the clergy, the damage suffered by churches and church buildings tends to be best recorded.

Church spires were toppled across the south-east of England, possibly because gusts there reached the highest levels or maybe because design standards were lower than in the generally more stormy south-west where stumpy, wind-resistant towers tend to be the norm. The tall spires of Kent and Sussex, arguably the counties worst-affected in the kingdom by the Storm, seem to have been particularly vulnerable, especially where they stood on relatively high land such as at Brenchley and nearby Great or East Peckham. One Thomas Figg, writing of the spire at Brenchley, where he was curate, claims that it was the highest in Kent, ‘at least 10 rods [165 ft] some say 12 [198 ft]’, before being levelled to the ground by the Storm. There it became ‘the sport and pastime of Boys and Girls who to future Ages, tho’ perhaps incredibly, yet can boast they leaped over such a Steeple’.

Although churches in Kent and Sussex may have been worst hit, spires were damaged across the country from Cardiff to Maldon in Essex. One of them was at Stowmarket in Suffolk where a 77-ft spire had been taken down in 1674 and replaced with one far more ambitious. Samuel Farr, the vicar at the time of the Storm, described this new structure as involving ‘the Addition of 10 Loads of new Timber, 21 thousand and 8 hundred weight of Lead’ so as to form a spire 100 ft high with ‘a Gallery at the height of 40 ft all open wherein hung a Clock-Bell of between 2 and 3 hundred weight’. Although the spire stood ‘but 8 Yards above the Roof’ such was the force of the wind that it crashed down into the nave so that ‘a third part of the Pews are broken all in pieces’. Farr’s estimate was that ‘It will cost 400 pounds to make all good’.

Although towers were better able to withstand the violence of the Storm than spires, they were by no means immune to the assault. In the West Country, Somerset appears to have suffered most. The tower at Compton Bishop, at the foot of the Mendip Hills facing across the flat expanse of the still unreclaimed marshlands of the Brue and Ax Rivers, was described as ‘much shatter’d’, while at St Mary’s, Batcombe, ‘all the battlements of the church on that side of the tower next to the wind were blown in’.

As at Fairford, the windward-facing west end of churches tended to experience most damage. St Michael’s, Beccles, in Suffolk stands on a spur of higher ground overlooking the low-lying Waveney Valley and is visible for miles around. The tower stands a little apart from the main body of the church at the west end of which the Great Window was blown in, just one casualty in a town which was ‘exceedingly shatter’d’ by the Storm. A large stone window at the west end of the church at Fareham in Hampshire was ‘broken down’. In Oxford, the church of St Peter-in-the-East was badly damaged by several sheets of lead, ‘judged near 6000 lb weight’, which were torn from the roof of Sir Joseph Williamson’s new building at The Queen’s College and hurled across Queen’s Lane through the west window of the church breaking a great iron bar. The lead made such a deafening noise as it fell that those who heard it thought the church’s tower had collapsed. By contrast, ‘a fine painted Glass Window’ in Lord Salisbury’s chapel at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire was broken ‘tho’ it looked towards the East’. This and the ruined north transept window of Bristol cathedral were, perhaps, exceptional.

Cambridge probably suffered rather more than did Oxford. St Mary’s, the University Church, was ‘much shattered’ and, according to the anonymous author of A Wonderful History of All the Storms, Hurricanes, Earthquakes etc., published in 1704, a fall of masonry ‘battered in pieces a curious Organ lately set up and purchased at £1500’. Worse, the architectural masterpiece of Cambridge, King’s College Chapel, was badly damaged. Many of its pinnacles were blown down and ‘the fine Windows with the Old and New Testament histories drawn on the glass, in a very strange manner much broken and defaced’.

In the course of this narrative the truth of the old saw about an ill wind will often be demonstrated. Stonemasons were obviously much sought after following the Storm but few could have benefited more than the nation’s plumbers, literally those skilled in the working of lead. The roofs of many of the better buildings were covered with lead, available relatively cheaply from the mines and furnaces of Derbyshire. An excellent material for keeping out the wet, lead has the disadvantage that it lacks rigidity so that if a roof has a steep pitch the lead sheet will sag or ‘creep’. The consequence was that roof design had changed as the medieval period had progressed: the pitch was gradually reduced and eaves were replaced by lead box gutters concealed behind a battlemented parapet. For the most part this was a practical and entirely adequate design but, in the event of exceptionally high wind speeds, lead sheets lying almost flat on a roof would have been torn up relatively easily, especially if the protecting parapet had already collapsed. While during the normal range of wind conditions in the British Isles, the weight of the lead was such as to keep it in place, storm-force winds could get beneath the sheets and lift them from the roof. Differential air pressure on either side of the roof may well have helped to literally suck the lead into the air. Generally, however, in such conditions the aerodynamic forces exerted by the wind are most important. Such forces tend to be directed inward on the windward facing wall – hence the vulnerability of west windows – and outwards on the roof, leeward wall and side walls of a building. If the sheets of lead on the roof were well secured along their upper edges, the effect of exceptionally strong winds was often to roll them up ‘like so much paper’, to use the words of Mr Shipman of Fairford. Similar imagery was used to describe what happened at Northampton where ‘Many sheets of lead on that Church [All Saints’] and also St Giles’s and St Sepulchre’s roled up like a Scroll’. Elsewhere a similar effect was compared to a bale cloth. Thus at Monmouth, ‘The lead of the roof of the great church [St Mary’s] tho’ on the side from the wind was roll’d up like a roll of Cloth’ and at St Philip’s, Bristol, the wind ‘ripped off the lead . . . and wrapped it up like folded cloth’. From Leamington Hastings in Warwickshire came this graphic account:

Between Eight and Nine the 27th I went up to the Church where I found the middle Isle clearly stript of the Lead from one end to the other and a great many of the sheets lying on the east End upon the Church, roll’d up like a piece of Cloth. I found on the ground 6 sheets of lead 50 hundred weight, all joyn’d together, not the least parted but as they lay upon the Isle, which 6 sheets were so carried in the Air 50 yards and may have been carried further but for a tree.

There was a similar occurrence at Berkeley in Gloucestershire:

26 sheets of lead hanging all together were blown off from the middle Isle of our Church and were carried over the North Isle and into the Church yard 10 yards distant . . . the Plummer told me the sheets weighed Three hundred and a half.

Likewise there was a report from Ewell in Surrey where:

the Lead from the flat roof of Mr Williams’s house was rolled up by the wind and blown from the top of the house clear over a brick wall near 10 feet high without damaging either the House or the wall, the Lead was carried near 6 Rod from the House.

The scene conjured up by these descriptions of airborne sheets of lead is astonishing. Because the highest wind speeds were reached before daybreak over most parts of the country affected by the Storm, no eyewitness descriptions of flying lead appear to have survived but some years later, in 1739, central Scotland was hit by a devastating hurricane and the Caledonian Mercury carried this account by a man who described what he saw as he clung for dear life to the railings about the Equestrian Statue in Parliament-close, Edinburgh. He saw part of the lead from one of the buildings about the close and, ‘weighing about 1200 weight . . . tore up, and carried to an incredible Height above the Edifice, where it hovered above half a Minute, waving like a Blanket, and then came down gently and with ease, till within 20 Foot of the Ground’.

In the days following the Great Storm plumbers must have surveyed a great variety of damage and been presented with all kinds of work. At Christchurch in Hampshire the roof of the priory church was uncovered and 12 sheets of lead ‘rouled up together’. At Middleton Stoney in north Oxfordshire, the leads of the church were rolled up and ‘the stone battlements of the Tower were blown upon the leads’. Although the general pattern appears to have been either for the lead sheets to have been rolled up or lifted clean off the roof, in some cases, as at Ewell, even rolled-up sheets of lead were blown off the roof. There is evidence too of less severe treatment, thus at Brighton the church leads were simply described as ‘turned up’ and at Tewkesbury Abbey they were ‘strangely ruffled’.

Churches were further damaged by falling masonry. Although collapsing spires would have caused most devastation, the fall of ornamental battlements and pinnacles also gave rise to much destruction. Bristol was hard hit in all manner of ways during the Storm and, of the churches, St Stephen’s and the cathedral were worst affected. Three of the elaborately buttressed and pierced pinnacles of St Stephen’s collapsed and ‘beat down the greater part of the church’, taking the clock with them and breaking the brass eagle and candlestick. The cathedral battlements suffered also as did two of the windows, although the damage does appear to have been far less than that experienced by the great cathedrals of Gloucester (‘the beautiful Cathedral Church of Gloucester suffer’d much’) and Ely (‘the loss which the church and college sustained being by computation £2000 ‘). From Bristol comes a touchingly Victorianised vignette of events about the cathedral on the night of the Storm. In his Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, published in 1887, John Latimer quotes from the memoirs of one James Stewart who recalled that his father, who was usher to the boys of the Gaunt’s Hospital School, was called from his bed ‘to attend the Children to the Chapter House in the Cloisters were they remained and sang psalms all the night.’ Latimer adds to Stewart’s account that ‘A part of the Cloisters was blown down during this strange nocturnal concert and the great north transept window of the Cathedral was demolished no doubt to the increased terror of the quavering little vocalists.’

The churches of Northampton were also badly damaged. All Saints’, in the Market Place, had been rebuilt in the Renaissance style following a fire which had devastated the town in 1675. The new church had been opened in 1680 thanks, in part, to a gift of 1,000 tons of timber from the royal forests of Whittlebury and Salcey. In 1701 an imposing portico had been added beneath the shelter of which, in future years, the peasant-poet John Clare was to spend many contemplative hours. During the Storm not only were the roof leads rolled up, as we have seen, but the church’s weathercock, although ‘placed on a mighty spindle of Iron was bowed together and made useless’. A similar indignity was inflicted upon the church weather-vane at Swansea in South Wales where ‘the tail of the Weathercock which stood in the middle of the tower was blown off and found in a Court near 400 yards distant from the tower’.

Widespread as was the damage to church property, from Fairford’s irreplaceable windows to Swansea’s broken weathervane, the clergy, with one very eminent exception, appear to have escaped unscathed. The story of Bishop Kidder of Bath and Wells deserves detailed attention not only for what it tells us of the Storm but also for what it tells us of the England upon which the Storm broke. Richard Kidder was seventy in 1703. He was a controversial figure in a Church in which controversy was endemic, although his unpopularity in his diocese was very largely due to the fact that he had replaced, in unusual circumstances, the much admired, to some saintly, figure of Bishop Ken.

Thomas Ken is best known today for his Morning and Evening Hymns, which include such famous lines as ‘Awake my soul, and with the sun’ and ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow’. He is rightly described as one of the fathers of modern hymnology. In his lifetime he was probably most famous for his refusal to accept William of Orange as the legitimate king. When, as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William and Mary replaced James II on the throne of England, a significant number of the clergy, including five bishops of whom Ken was one, refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchs on the grounds that to do so would be a breach of the oath they had already sworn to James. These non-jurors clung to two of the fundamental doctrines of what was to become known as High Church policy. They believed in the hereditary right of kings and in non-resistance: the doctrine that whatever wrongs a monarch inflicted upon his people, it was a greater wrong to oppose his hereditary, God-given right to rule. As the historian G.M. Trevelyan colourfully has it: ‘Men who turned purple with rage when the Dissenters asked them for Toleration . . . knew so little of their own high temper that they vowed that if Nero were hereditary king of England, they would let him take their lands, their tithes, their laws, their very lives without raising a hand against him.’ Rather more fairly perhaps, believing that kings ruled by Divine Right, they had been appalled by the act of regicide earlier in the century and were determined that it should not happen again. In Ken’s case this did not mean that he was servile to the wishes of the king. Famously, in 1683 when Charles II visited Winchester, Ken’s prebendal house in the Cathedral close was chosen as a suitable residence for the King’s mistress, Nell Gwynne. Ken objected, arguing that ‘a woman of ill-repute ought not to be endured in the house of a clergyman’. He won his point and alternative accommodation for the former orange vendor was found. To his credit, Charles admired Ken’s obstinate piety and when, in the following year, the bishopric of Bath and Wells fell vacant, the King asked for ‘the good little man that refused his lodgings to poor Nell’.

The bishops chosen by William to replace